Looks like parts of the Minding the Future panel along with individual interviews with its particpants will be featured on NPR’s “With Good Reason” radio show this Sunday, November 17th from 1-2 PM on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital. It will be fun to hear what the show makes of the event and its featured speakers. What’s more, I’m hoping Sarah McConnell covers some of the issues, topics, and presentations she saw at the OpenVA conference the following day. I guess I’ll just have to listen to find out. Below is a copy of the press release released by UMW yesterday. All this just serves as a haunting reminder that I have yet to blog about either of these amazing events that took place almost a month ago. Hope springs eternal!

Highlights from the first Open and Digital Learning Resources Conference held at the University of Mary Washington in October will be featured on the public radio show “With Good Reason.” The conference, known as OpenVA, brought together more than 250 experts from Virginia institutions to examine the future of higher education and technology. The show, “The Future of Higher Education,” will air beginning on Saturday, Nov. 16.

“With Good Reason” is a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. The show airs weekly in Fredericksburg on Sundays from 1-2 p.m. on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital. To listen from outside of the Fredericksburg area, a complete list of air times and links to corresponding radio stations can be found athttp://withgoodreasonradio.org/when-to-listen/.

It’s hard to believe both Minding the Future and OpenVA are less than a week away now. I’ve finally gotten the titles and abstracts of the 10-minute talks happening in the afternoon along with a sneak preview of some of the issues to be discussed in the closing panel discussion. This should be a pretty amazing day, and I think we should be able to stream it all live at http://ds106.tv. Stay tuned for more on that front. In the meantime, feast your eyes on this, a conference about the future of education that can actually resist the popular urge to advocate systemically dismantling and defunding higher ed
_____________________________________________

2:30-3:00 Alan Levine’s “Memorable/Unmemorable”
If asked whether they would like to be remembered, almost no one would answer “No”. But multiple choice questions can be trickier than they seem. The education future some are painting for us is a path focused on a destination, reached via an unmemorable journey.

3:00 -3:30 Kin Lane’s “Access, Interoperability, Privacy and Security Of Technology Will Set The Stage For The Future of Education”
The future of education will be fueled by the access and interoperability introduced by common, everyday web and mobile applications that our children use in school and at home, and we depend on as adults in our workplaces and personal lives. By providing proper access and interoperability in applications, bundled with the healthy education of end-users around these features, and fully respecting user’s privacy and security, technologists can help define the future of education and evolve the next generation of citizens who are web literate by default, and never stop learning, creating and sharing.

3:30 – 4:00: Audrey Watters’s “A Future with Only 10 Universities”
Sebastian Thrun’s claims that in 50 years, we’ll only have 10 institutions “delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them.” What (horror) has to happen in order to get us to “ten.”

4:00 – 4:30 David Wiley’s “Implications of the Open Content Infrastructure”
Open infrastructures radically decrease the cost (and therefore risk) of experimentation, which consequently increases the pace of innovation. For example, the open communications infrastructure known as the internet radically reduced the cost of experimenting with new services and business models dealing in information (c.f. the costs and risks of experimenting with pre-internet “publication” business models for disseminating information or enabling communication). Over the last decade, individuals, foundations, and governments have built an open content infrastructure (OER) on top of the open communications infrastructure (internet). This open content infrastructure has enabled a second wave of low cost / low risk experimentation in a range of content-related fields including education and research.

4:30 – 5:00: Jon Udell’s “Observable work and the reinvention of apprenticeship”
For most of human history the work of the world was directly observable. A young person saw, and often participated in, the farming and the hunting and the building. Then the adults vanished from the scene. They had all gone to the factory or the office. Work became opaque to the young.

Now work is again becoming observable. Increasingly both the processes and products of work are represented digitally, in ways that can enable learners and practitioners to connect. Will universities nurture those connections?

This panel will include all of the day’s speakers responding to a wide variety of questions—a sampling of whcih can be found below:

What have been the most exciting developments in higher education over the last 5 years?

What will be the most exciting developments in higher education in the next 5 years?What developments concern you?

Who are the major players (people, institutions, businesses, foundations) in the digitally enabled higher education landscape? What are their goals? Who pays for this transformation?

What role does the defunding of higher education, especially at the state level, have to do with these changes?

What is the role of the state and federal government in these conversations? What is it likely to be, going forward?

Business and technology leaders have been telling those of us in higher education that we have our heads in the sand, that MOOCS in particular are going to wash over us and we will be out of business. So, do public institutions of higher education have their collective heads in the sand when it comes to MOOCs, online learning, and “electronic delivery revolution”? If so, what are we missing and why?

Note: This email was sent to everyone that registered to attend the OpenVA conference, if you believe you are registered but did not receive this email let us know by emailing jimgroom@gmail.com ASAP.

Hello all,

I want to start this email by thanking you all for your patience it was has been a fairly drawn out planning process given we were forced to reschedule last March due to an anomalous snow storm. That said, it is time to get excited again because the schedule for OpenVA is nothing short of amazing. Over 230 people from just about every college and university around the state of Virginia will be on hand to share the work they’re doing. And that is what this conference is all about!

What’s more, if you are coming into town the day before, October 14th, we recommend you registering for the “Minding the Future” event (it’s totally free and dinner will be served) to listen to a number of nationally recognized technologists and educators discuss the broader national landscape when it comes to the convergence of education and technology. If you are interested, go here to register. Think of this as setting the conceptual table for the following day’s event at OpenVA that will demonstrate the innovative thinking and practices happening around the state.

Some important details!

Directions to OpenVA (Oct 15)
OpenVA will be taking place at UMW’s Stafford Campus, here is a link to it on Google Maps. Keep in mind it’s about 15 minutes northwest of the Fredericksburg Campus (exit 133 West on the 95).

Directions to “Minding the Future” (Oct 14)
The “Minding the Future” event happening on October 14th from 2:30-7:30 will be held at the Jepson Alumni Executive Center on the Fredericksburg Campus, here is a map for that.

Carnival Presenters
If you are presenting in the morning at the carnival and have not been contacted about any technical requirements you might have, please contact us immediately at jimgroom@gmail.com

All Other Presenters
If you have technical requirements beyond a provided computer (or a computer hookup) and internet, please let us know ASAP.

Finally, if there are any emergency issues related to weather or otherwise leading up to the conference please check the OpenVA website for announcements and information: http://openva.org.

And that’s that, barring another act of God this conference is on like Donkey Kong!

I learned this past week that Sarah McConnell of NPR’s With Good Reason radio show will be coming to OpenVA on October 15th. The With Good Reason crew will be interviewing various people throughout the day from around the state as well as taking in the tech carnival, Fred Talks, afternoon presentations, and featured panels. It’s exciting to learn that a public radio show focused on education is coming to OpenVA. That said, it’s also entirely appropriate given the conference is focused on findings ways to promote the amazing work happening around Virginia’s public institutions of higher education, as well as fostering more robust and lasting statewide collaborations. Bring your radio voices, people!

OpenVA just got that much more awesome with this conference before the conference. On Monday, October 14th we will be bringing in five world-reknowned thinkers to discuss the disrutpive nature of technology and its impact on higher education. This event will be held at UMW’s Jepson Executive Alumni Center and is free and open to the public as long as seats are available (register here). This event was made possible by an auspicious alignment of resources, and it might be thought of as both a primer for and prelude to OpenVA.

What might Virginia’s higher ed institutions do in terms of experimenting with distributed, virtual learning? How can the Commonwealth encourage technology-mediated exploration, collaboration, and implementation amongst a wide range of faculty, technologists, and students from its 39 public institutions of higher ed? These are two of the questions I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. In fact, I talk about them to just about anyone who’ll listen. A couple of months ago I asked Joe DeFillipo and Beverly Covington of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), whom I’ve been working closely with on OpenVa for the last 18 months, what Virginia is doing at the statewide level in terms of fostering collaboration amongst its public universities and colleges. The question seemed worth pursuing, so we organized a discussion about that very idea a few weeks later.

The conference committee has decided to reschedule the first annual Digital learning Resources conference for October 15th at UMW’s Stafford Campus. We understand that rescheduling may present certain scheduling challenges and conflicts for some, but given the restraint on facilities and open dates on UMW’s campus this is the date the worked best.

If you were scheduled to present, and this causes any issues please contact us directly here. If you were registered to attend, but can’t attend given the the new dates, let us know using